Well, I’m sure that there are many people that are running VMware Server 2 on CentOS 5. After all, it’s one of the major Host OSes that VMware recognizes. Popularity notwithstanding, there is a major bug that can bring your VM screamer to a hault.

CentOS 5.4 has a new glibc package that essentially breaks VMware Server’s hostd process. There are many posts out there regarding the issues, and various means of fixing them. However, I am just going to summarize info I’ve found out there on the net, and hopefully you should be able to follow very easily and get your VMs back up and running.

PROBLEM:

VMware Server 2 (hostd) crashes on CentOS 5 after upgrading to the latest releases of glibc and glibc-common

NOTE ON SOLUTIONS:There are two methods to solve this. The first requires downgrading the libraries system-wide. This should be fine if you only use the CentOS host as a VMware Server Host and nothing else. However, if you are in doubt whether your other applications, etc. on that host will run on a slightly older version of glibc, please use SOLUTION METHOD 2 as it will only affect VMware, and essentially tell VMware Server where to look for the correct libraries it needs.

UPDATE: vSphere Client supports Windows 7 as of vSphere 4.0 Update 1. If you aren’t running vSphere 4 Update 1 or later, following the below will allow you to function until you are able to upgrade.

Well, I finally took the plunge on my workstation and installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I really am impressed with the usability. And, like the improvements that have been made. I have been on the Beta on one of my home machines, so I’m not entirely new to the Windows 7 look and feel.

Not being too familiar with linux printing, I blindly assumed that as long as the parallel port worked in the Linux host OS, that parallel port passthrough would work just fine. So, I proceeded to add a virtual parallel port to my Windows VM running on VMware Server 2.0.1 under CentOS 5.3.

I soon realized that this wasn’t as easy as it seemed. CentOS printed test pages, etc. just fine from the host using the device /dev/lp0. However, VMware wanted to use the device /dev/parport0 – actually, I really didn’t have an option as it was simply a drop-down menu and not a simply text field to enter whichever device I wanted to specify.Continue reading…

Just flew in to Raleigh, NC today for the VMware Fast Track Training this week. I’m pretty excited to be able to participate in some ‘official’ education from VMware, and this will hopefully be a good week with plenty of valuable information to take home. My biggest fear is… Continue reading…